Ellen Pompeo talks negotiating her 'Grey's Anatomy' salary, meeting Harvey Weinstein
Ellen Pompeo isn't just Meredith Grey on the hit ABC series Grey's Anatomy — she's also an actress fighting for what she deserves in the industry.
Pompeo, who was named the highest-paid actress on a prime-time drama in 2017, opened up about the business side of her role in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published Wednesday, starting with how Patrick Dempsey's departure from the show in 2015 changed the game.
"For me, Patrick leaving the show was a defining moment, deal-wise. They could always use him as leverage against me — 'We don’t need you; we have Patrick' — which they did for years," she said. "I don’t know if they also did that to him, because he and I never discussed our deals. There were many times where I reached out about joining together to negotiate, but he was never interested in that."
So how did she negotiate her new pact, which has her earning more than $20 million a year (and $575,000 per episode), according to the magazine? She did her research and asked for what she thought she deserved.
"What happened is that I went to Shonda (Rhimes) and I said, 'If you’re moving on to Netflix and you want the show to go down, I’m cool with that. But if you want it to continue, I need to be incentivized. I need to feel empowered and to feel ownership of this show,'" Pompeo explain.
In the interview, she also discussed her experience meeting Harvey Weinstein.
"My agent once sent me to see Harvey, too. I went right up to his room at the Peninsula, which I would never normally do, but Harvey was a New York guy, so it made sense. Plus, it was in the middle of the day, and he had an assistant there," she said. "He didn’t try anything on me. Had he, I’m a little rough around the edges and I grew up around some very tough people, so I probably would have picked up a vase and cracked him over the (expletive) head."
She wasn't shy about her own intentions going into the meeting, however.
"I also feel completely comfortable saying that I walked into that room batting the shit out of my eyelashes. My goal in that room was to charm him, as it is in most rooms like that."
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Although she had no unfortunate run-ins with Weinstein, she wasn't so lucky when it came to director and screenwriter James Toback, she told Paste BN in November.
"I actually did have a situation with James Toback where I kind of told him to go (expletive) himself," she said, recalling an incident early in her career.
"It was held in a public place and I brought a man — my friend Tony," she recalls. "And he didn't like that at all. And I could tell that. I could tell instantly that he was, like, no good. The minute my friend left, he asked me if I would get naked in a movie. And I was like, 'Really, dude? My friend has been missing all of 30 seconds and now you say that? I kind of laughed in his face."